“This ship of civilization is going down…”
Have you ever thought of the bright sides of one of the world’s most devastating tragedy – the First World War? It would surely take a hardy soul to see it. However, in his ever-so-distinctive essay, Gwynne Dyer challenges the preconception of the negative effects of World War I and presents the useful purpose of it, comparing it to an “alarm bell of a stricken ship.”
“It would be another two and a half decades before the first nuclear weapon was dropped on a city, another four decades before Dame Barbara Ward began talking about “spaceship earth,” another six before Carl Sagan and his colleagues stumbled onto the ironically unifying concept of a “nuclear winter.”” But the First World War, Dyer says, gave people their “first glimpse of the abyss.”
He mentions how the first glimpse of destruction had provoked a quick reaction, as “ordinary men started writing extraordinary things.” “Humble men like British infantryman frank Richard would never before have had the temerity to write about their experiences; Her Privates We, Richards called his book about the infantrymen in war.”
As governments realized the extraordinary changes, Dyer argues, the problem was one of scale. “Governments and states were still behaving in ways that had hardly changed since the eighteenth century, and (apart from the exacerbating effects of popular nationalism) the political causes and the initial strategic moves of the First World War differed little from those of the War of the Spanish Succession two centuries before.” As population and technological advancements (such as “the increase the per capita GNP tenfold and single-shot muzzle-loading muskets with machine guns that fire six hundred bullets a minute”) increased drastically, the potential consequences had gone out of measure, changing “the very nature of the game.”
The political consequences of the War are also discussed, as Dyer starts to question the European power. “The shock of the First World War also killed the smug confidence of the late nineteenth century that “history” knew what it was doing when it gave the Europeans such enormous power; one of the characteristics of twentieth-century European consciousness is a sense that history is in deep trouble and needs help.” Dyer brings up on important point. A wide misunderstanding about European power keeping the world together had been shattered by WWI. Therefore people started to question their power, debating whether they were stopping warfare or as a greater continent, contributing to it.
“But one can expand the argument quite a long way beyond that,” Dyer goes on, “There is nothing unique in the twentieth century’s view of itself as the vital turning point of human history, of course—half the ages of humanity have believed that they lived in the final days. But the peculiar twentieth–century version of this apocalyptic vision relies on some quite tangible evidence, and the fact that people have cried world many times before does not disprove the existence of wolves.” In the 19th century, people merely predicted such destructions of humanity, but action wasn’t taken until the occurrence of WWI. Therefore, Dyer argues, as imaginations have become reality, we much prepare and brace ourselves from such catastrophes.
Dyer presents the idea that patriarchal civilizations and systems is what had led to these warfares. “Patriarchal civilizations, typified in the rigid class systems, slavery, armies and the systematic depoliticization and suppression of women, were so efficient at warfare that they eliminated virtually all rival models.” Therefore, our survival now depends on the change of dominating warfare. Instead of illuminating such systems that are efficient during war, why not just avoid war as a whole?
“It is now necessary to end no just some particular war, but the whole institution of war.” Dyer argues that WWI has changed the method of warfare, where countries found peace as hierarchies because unnecessary. “Why, after five thousand years without any serious challenge, should the patriarchal institutions have come into question in this period? If we admit the hypothesis that the rise of patriarchy, including the institution of warfare, filled a need for strong hierarchy and central direction in newly formed mass societies that had no other means of articulating themselves, then the advent of alternative, more democratic means for deciding a society’s values and goals was bound to challenge patriarchy.”
However, the essay presents the idea of how although the war frightened millions of people into thinking seriously about the prospects for civilization itself for the first time, it solved nothing. “Seventy-three years later, we are still in the midst of a struggle to alter the characteristics behaviours of civilized societies in ways that will give human civilization a better chance of survival.”
“It is a struggle that will probably continue long past our own lifetimes, and it is clearly not a foregone conclusion that we will win it. We have both the United Nations and nuclear weapons, the environmental movement and global warming, the rapid spread of democracy and the widening North-South economic gulf. We must continue to regard civilization as an experiment in progress.
But it is just as well that we had the First World War when we did. At a relatively modest cost, it gave us early warning of what kinds of perils we were about to encounter and caused us to start thinking about how to survive them a few decades earlier than we might otherwise have done. For all we know, that could be the margin between success and failure.
That is one of the speculations that can never be proved. But if you doubt that the margin is narrow, consider a twentieth century in which the old empires and the old complacency continued into the 1940s or 1950s, and acquired all the technology that accrued in the meantime, before they stumbled into their first fully industrialized war. We would probably be in a lot deeper trouble than we are–if, indeed, we were here at all.”
Image: https://www.findmypast.co.uk/ww1